is it a game is it a virus, you decide!...

[xeroshiva1029]

... or malware bytes can decide for me.. https://i.imgur.com/9OZzPRn.png

anyone ever even seen this with any other game? like seriously lets talk about why this exe is collecting information about my system w/o my approval/knowledge. i looked at the settings there is no toggle to turn it off/on

[Wicked001]

Originally posted by Dwane Dibbley:

Originally posted by xeroshiva1029:

riiiight its the TOS thats causing my virus protection to freak out.. played the game for 2 days before it started. and honestly there is an uninstall button and a customer service for refund if this is doing anything malicious. TOS or not, you dont exactly sell your soul to the devil over a idle clicker game.

You obviously have no idea how malware detection works. Its all about HOW is thing coded, not WHAT is coded. You can make this info sending in 50 different ways, 49 of them wouldnt be detected as threat, but 1 can SEEMS suspicious to detection algorithms, which doesnt automaticaly mean that its bad.

To further Dwayne's statement: You can go into your antivirus software and manually tell it to ignore clicker heroes 2. Because you told clicker heroes 2 that you were willing to submit this information about your system and your game save and environment states, you should be willing to accept that they are not trying anything malicious and give them a pass through your firewall/AV protection.

Otherwise, if you suspect that Playsaurus is in fact infecting your system with malware... Uninstall the software immediately and run a full system scan to make sure it didn't leave any residue that might become a trojan horse later. ;)

[Dwane Dibbley]

BTW, i remember how i was strugling with installment of STEAM CLIENT on one of new laptops. After hour or so i managed to find the problem. McAfee antivirus, without single notification, kept deleting one of steams DLL during instalation.

[Sherlock]

These machine learning virus detections are really just heuristical tools. They don't run the code or anything like that.

Anyways, if you look at the data that CH2 sends, it's extremely benign stuff. For starters, it's all cleartext, so you can just examine it yourself ... they havent even taken the trivially easy step of sending it over SSL.

There appear to be 3 types of queries sent to their server:
- news update, just an http request. happens every 15 minutes
- player character info, sent once at game start
- player progress info, sent every hour

All off these requests are small, and make sense for exactly the purposes the developer would have. This isn't leaking machine information, or doing crypto mining. Hypothetically, the hash could be used for redshell-type fingerprinting, but a FAR more reasonable interpretation is that it's just a validator for the information you see here....

Character info passes this information to their server:
characterNumber=123451234512&uniqueUserId=STM-YOURUNIQUENUMBER&hash=12345123451234512345123451234512&requests={"1":{"characterType":1,"createdTimestamp":1532187065,"type":"createCharacter","startingSeed":11}}&gameVersion=0.052 beta

Progress info passes this information to their server:
characterNumber=1234512345123&uniqueUserId=STM-YOURUNIQUENUMBER&hash=12345123451234512345123451234512&requests={"1":{"currentLevel":47,"highestWorld":3,"lastPlayedTimestamp":1532191021,"totalAncientShardsPurchased":3,"runsInHighestWorld":0,"type":"updateCharacter","totalRubiesEarned":1282}}&gameVersion=0.052 beta

[2bizzyTOULOUSE]

On a related note...on the first launch message telling you that they will collect information about your game state it does actually link to their privacy policy:

https://www.clickerheroes.com/privacyPolicy.txt

I have never seen such a short thing which in my opinion is a very good sign.
But please just check it out and decide for yourselves.

[Wicked001]

More importantly, "You Decide," was the original title.

I have decided. It is not a virus (I will not be held accountable in any way shape or form if at any point in the future it comes to light that it is, in fact, a virus).

Now that it has been decided, open your firewall and disable your antivirus against the application and enjoy the game!

[Anuwiel]

it kinda sucks. My computer is very clean because i like it this way. it sort of freak me out not having a official answer on this ?

[2bizzyTOULOUSE]

Maybe try the more official channels then...

(Email, twitter, reddit etc.)

[Nathanh]

* You currently can't start the game, so you can't agree to any kind of license (making the whole 'but you agreed to it" a mood point. The game clearly starts doing something you didn't agree to (yet) before even giving you the option to agree to it.

* Seeing how there are a LOT of games out there that try and gather information without detection does makes me wonder what kind of detection they are execly doing, especially since the previous build was fine.

[2bizzyTOULOUSE]

Originally posted by Nathanh:

* You currently can't start the game, so you can't agree to any kind of license (making the whole 'but you agreed to it" a mood point. The game clearly starts doing something you didn't agree to (yet) before even giving you the option to agree to it.

* Seeing how there are a LOT of games out there that try and gather information without detection does makes me wonder what kind of detection they are execly doing, especially since the previous build was fine.

First part is BS, the game runs fine I did just test it.

Second part is true, given the history of Playsaurus I am giving them the benefit of the doubt though until someone can provide solid evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately this thread is full of people who do not understand how virus/malware detection works which makes it a mess xD

[Nathanh]

Originally posted by 2bizzyTOULOUSE:

First part is BS, the game runs fine I did just test it.

Second part is true, given the history of Playsaurus I am giving them the benefit of the doubt though until someone can provide solid evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately this thread is full of people who do not understand how virus/malware detection works which makes it a mess xD

Actually not BS for me. The moment I try to start the game, malwarebytes blocks it directly. Meaning that the game isn't starting for me at all.

[2bizzyTOULOUSE]

Lol, then just disable/turn off malwarebytes...jesus you are blindly obeying your anti-virus software even for a game you wilfully and purposefully did buy and install through steam?
That is some kind of logic mate...

[Nathanh]

I prefer "better safe then sorry", especially when it took 2 or 3 months before people realized ccleaner was hacked. Not saying the same is going on here, but... as I said "better safe then sorry". Feel free to call it "blindly obeying" or "slightly paranoid" or whatever... ;)

[Ranger Gilan]

My webroot does this to everygame (well almost), but because it's a system I trust I allow it. Use your own judgement of course, but most likely you're fine.